


this too, unfolds

by aosc



Series: I gave you all my soul [1]
Category: Bleach
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 03:36:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5114477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>April is the cruelest month.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this too, unfolds

**Author's Note:**

> or roadtripping. on foot. through hueco mundo. in an alternate universe where grimmjow battles odd feelings, part two.

* * *

 

.1 _mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain._

 

  
The slither of pines crouching over him in crisses and crosses until they far, far up ahead form an arch of a dead crown that stretches across the entire forest's neck is the only crown that Grimmjow has ever worn in this part of Hueco Mundo.

 

The forest's mat is thick and plush beneath the trek of his paws, despite the fact that it is all dead; the wires of the trunks, the spindly fingers of the branches. Its inhabitants. They are all dead. Despite this, he walks. Because he walked before he knew that he still harbored a soul that tied an identity to his body. He prowled, rounding a thicket of small trees, preyed upon whisks of spirits in the forms of coyotes and armadillos with unseeing gouges for eyes, before he realized that the growling in his stomach was the craving for nourishment. And he wore the forest's crown proudly before he innately felt that he was to be coronated.

 

"Oi, I know this is probably gonna sound rude, or whatever, but -- can you like, talk, like this?"

 

The king and the -- what? Grimmjow stops, and twists slowly his head so to rest his jaw on the slope of his shoulder. Kurosaki is watching him pensively; defensive now. "What?" he asks.

 

"Didn't realize you were that stupid. Or scratch that -- I fuckin' knew you were all dumb, Kurosaki."

 

Kurosaki glares. "Like I know about any of this crap, asshole," he says.

 

"Aren't ya the prodigal son or whatever bull the Shinigami are always yappin' on about? Shut up n' walk, fuckwit."

 

"And here I was, worrying about being rude, to _you_ ," Kurosaki mutters, testy, but does starts to walk again.

 

Grimmjow knows the natural curves of the forest. Has slept in the hard nooks and crannies between the proverbial rock and the hard place. They turn a few miles later, coming into a slope that declines, opening up as a tiny valley where their dull steps echo between grassy walls. Grimmjow feels his wounds; refuses to stop, despite being finely tuned to the way the scarring across his chest is creaking with blood coming through, or the scratches and gapes of flesh winding up his legs and stretching languid and red and aching across his back.

 

He learned to ignore pain before he had properly been wounded by the wildness of the nature and the snarl of a higher-ranking hollow for the first time. And he can't stop now. Kurosaki saved his ass. And that should taste sour on his tongue like nothing else.

 

He wonders why it is that Kurosaki is following him around now, obtuse in the white of the enemy's eye. Grimmjow could kill him right then and there. Always. It doesn't matter that Kurosaki saved him, pulled him from the ruins and the fight, weighing a good 30 lbs on the drop of his skinny frame, bleeding through and onto the bare of his spine. Grimmjow could whip around now, put the jag of a claw through his carotid.

 

He won't. But he could.

 

* * *

 

.2 _a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief._

 

  
They edge the forest to come out onto the dunes of the desert, stretching endless and barren before them. Grimmjow has slept on the fold of his legs and paws whenever they have stopped; too torn up still, reiatsu pulsing, bloody, thick, out of his sustained injuries. Kurosaki hasn't said much, but cast him long glances beneath the fan of his eyelashes when he thinks that Grimmjow doesn't watch him beneath the thin of his eyelid at all times.

 

 _The naïvety of humans, fuck 'em_ , he thinks, and could spit if it weren't wholly undignified to.

 

Kurosaki takes one step out into the sand, illuminated to the finest grains of sand by the half crescent of the moon. " _I will show you fear in a handful of dust_ ," he says, conversationally.

 

Grimmjow snorts. "Didn't know you were a poet at heart, Shinigami."

 

"T.S Eliot is actually kind of decent," Kurosaki says, and takes another step into the milk of the light.

 

Grimmjow follows. "Nah," he replies, "He's kinda shit."

 

"What, like you know?" Kurosaki half turns, and in a gust of wind, the tatters of his shihakushō flap, and his hair is gold, and the knife sharp lines of his lips are quirked like Grimmjow's talking some real shit.

 

Grimmjow could kill him. Because whilst Kurosaki is standing there, looking half a saint that tugs on Grimmjow's conscious, Grimmjow has always trekked across the desert with the moon and the sun dawning beneath him, throwing his shadow, perching on the crown of his head. It isn't mercy that makes him not lash out; rip up Kurosaki's thigh, sink his teeth into the inside of it, count the seconds of the full two minutes it'll take him to bleed out into the unforgiving wasteland.

 

"I wasn't born into this shitty space, Kurosaki," Grimmjow replies, and swats at the Shinigami with the whip of his tail, passing him. "Not that it wasn't a waste of breath bein' human."

 

Kurosaki is silent for a full minute. Grimmjow doesn't look back to see to him. They're not out here for pleasure, dry mouths and weakening bodies in the mouth of Hueco Mundo's natural violence. And Grimmjow fully, and truly, does not care for if he's just shocked the Shinigami, if it so were into rigor mortis.

 

"So, did you dye your hair that unfortunate color right before you died?" Kurosaki says. There's a full bodied smirk in his voice.

 

Grimmjow would like to flip him off. "The only unfortunate thing here's that your head is somehow still attached to your body, you good fer nothin' piece of shit," he growls, and quickens his pace.

 

The soft rolls of hills in the desert soothes like balm on his mind. Here, he is at home. Here, he ruled before he knew that it was possible to govern over a landscape so untamed it brought him to his knees on the daily. Here, he could sleep in the gape of a cave overseeing the entire sandscape, and sit on a throne of white rock, and send a whiplash of reiatsu out so far that when he went hunting, the sand ridges showed half buried caracals and shriveled desert flowers for miles at a time.

 

* * *

 

Kurosaki stumbles over ridges, and when Grimmjow senses gerbils around a rock, the Shinigami coughs on the dry air, or swears at a whiff of sand in his eyes. The desert is to him so unfamiliar; a thing that isn't innately buried in your marrow. They walk on throughout the night, silent as they can be, with Las Noches a ghostly skeleton on the horizon, clean pipes of bone that rise from the sand at distance. Then half forgotten in the sunlight. And then, its true form developed only in the night.

 

It is a clear shape until they meet with a desert storm that will swallow them up on its wide tongue and spit them out as carcasses, and then the castle is just a mirage in the distance, wobbling.

 

Here, they could die.

 

Kurosaki puts a too used hand on the hilt of his sword. Grimmjow snarls, baring his teeth. "Give it up, ya dumbass. How the fuck do you expect to battle a sandstorm with yer fists?"

 

Kurosaki frowns, and looks around, away from the roar of the storm, searching for shelter. The curl of his hand drops from his sword. Grimmjow knows that move of his body. The stretch of his abdominal muscles, widening when he twists, his oblique flexing when he lets his arm drop.

 

He could kill him for letting go of the one thing that has always protected him in the lands of the dead. But so could the storm, and the storm cares very little for whether it can or cannot punctuate an aorta at precisely the right time to see the surprise before the betrayal in the light, as it goes out in Kurosaki's eyes.

 

Grimmjow briefly wonders why it's so important that he can't see what passes through Kurosaki's innately human mind as he is killed.

 

Then the storm hits them. It goes on, whining, creating wreckages out of nothing but particles and grains, coloring everything grey and red and rubs and whets at the corners of everything that is sharp and vigilant. Grimmjow bows his head down to breathe into the crook of his hind leg, pinching his eyes shut. Here, you are left out to die at no man's hand, and it will go on until you are smooth and blank and has lost your sharpness to trickle down into the desert.

 

When the dust finally settles, Grimmjow is curled away from the whorl of the storm. He blinks the sand out of his eyes until he can see, and looks to the far north, that is once more bright and cold in the dead of night. Las Noches is still there, remaining, like it could never be brought down. Perhaps it cannot be.

 

But then -- Kurosaki.

 

Kurosaki has his giant cleaver of a sword out; one hand on its hilt, one on the giant curve of the blade. Blood and sand in equal measures drip from it, and Grimmjow can see from where he is that Kurosaki's fingertips are sunk down onto the metal, cleanly down to the bone.

 

When the dust settled back at the battle, Kurosaki had dragged him away from Nnoitra's scythe, bleeding from his eyebrow and from his palms, from his hip and from his throat. He had pulled Grimmjow onto the dislocated pipe of his shoulder, a ragged moan of pain tearing from his throat, and ducked in behind a chunk of debris as Nnoitra turned away, kept Grimmjow quiet and bleeding on the half of his back.

 

Grimmjow could kill him. Wearing a crown of ragged branches, of the licked clean bones of little desert foxes, holding the power to rule a kingdom, he certainly would have. There comes a responsibility with being king, and that is to make sure you are unthreatened on the perch of your throne.

 

But Kurosaki draws a shaky breath, and lets his zanpakutō fall, and bleeds as he sinks to his knees before Grimmjow, and smiles blindly as he says, "You're welcome, asshole."

 

* * *

 

.3 _the chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on the marble, where the glass held up by standards wrought with fruited vines._

 

  
In the concave of a valley edging the forest and the desert, filled with rock and twining roots of dead trees, Grimmjow sat before a heap of half bled out Adjuchas, on his hind legs, and surveyed the scene with little care for the low hisses and grunts of pain that came from beneath.

 

He licked his paw clean of blood, and yawned, and knew, that to survive, this, here, had to become all his.

 

Hueco Mundo let loose its horrors and the best of its blood curdling souls, primitive and borne out of a desire to kill. Grimmjow took them all down, and climbed back up to languish at the top of the valley sink.

 

He knows, in the present, that it's unwise to leave his primal form, that Pantera, stretched out in the dark back of his mind, warms him not to. But Kurosaki, dizzy with blood loss, a tangent to what Grimmjow has always known, is still on his knees, paling, and Grimmjow swears. He doesn't know what to do with this.

 

He could kill him, right now. Passively allow him to bleed out.

 

He knows where to turn and where to descend, to get to the knobbly path leading down and into the valley. It is empty now. Void of souls and scraps of barely-human things that used to be drawn to the raw power he'd let curl around his makeshift throne.

 

Making the transition back and forth between forms takes a lot of power that his still healing wounds won't really allow, but in the width of a second, Kurosaki topples from where the shifting ground digs into his knees, and Grimmjow, feline, stretches out, until he can feel his claws sink into the extensions of his fingers, and the bones in his legs grow, sprout, become long. He becomes a solid weight beneath Kurosaki just in time for him to not meet with the ground with impact.

 

"Yer a fucking moron, Kurosaki," he mutters, and tears a strip of his hakama to wrap around the grisly cuts on Kurosaki's fingers.

 

They begin the crossing of the desert south bound, Grimmjow pulling Kurosaki half up on his right shoulder, unconscious, bleeding through his hakama and in to his skin. Away from the blood pooling in the cavities of the sand.

 

Grimmjow won't kill him. Knows in the place in his gut where it churns like the froth of the sea that they have come full circle now, when the moon darkens behind a wisp of cloud, his crown obscured, and Kurosaki breathes stuttering and warm into the skin of Grimmjow's bared shoulder, the bow of his lips pressing into the inception of the scar reddish on the tip of Grimmjow's breastbone.

 

* * *

  


End file.
